Okay so you’ve got a blog. Now what?

In most cases you started your blog because you have information to share with the blogosphere. You probably have a lot of content inside you just waiting to burst out onto the page.

You probably started a blog because you’d read that Google loves blogs so you’re anxious to start posting and sharing information with your readers and attracting a steady stream of traffic.

But before you start writing, there are a few things you should be doing to maximize your blog posts for the search engines.

SEO Tips for Bloggers

I won’t go into how to best develop your keywords or keyword phrases (be sure to read Discovering the Keyword Matrix and Choosing Your Best Keywords).  Today I want to focus on the best places to incorporate those keywords on your blog site.

Where to Use Keywords in Your Post Content

There are a few critical areas in each blog post where you need to focus the majority of your SEO efforts.

First, you’ll want to ensure that you use some keywords in your post title.  For example, the title of this post is Anatomy of a Good SEO Optimized Blog Post.

SEO, blog post, optimized are some of the keywords I’m hoping my reader will use to search for that type of information in Google (well I did more than hope, I did a little keyword research!)

You’ll also want to make sure that you use your keywords and keyword phrases in your post content a few times but make sure that your content reads well to a human!  After all, what your readers think matter much more than what a search engine robot thinks of your content.  So make sure your content is readable and not just a series of keywords slapped up on a page.

A few other tips for using keywords in your blog post content

  • use keywords in your post subtitles and be sure to use H1 and H2 tags as appropriate
  • use bold and italics on key phrases, as appropriate
  • be sure to include images where the file name of the image itself has been optimized to include keywords as well as including keywords in your alt and title tags

The Post Permalink

Once your post content is written, there are other ways in which you can include keywords on each individual post.  The post permalink is perhaps the most often overlooked area that can really help optimize your blog posts.  The permalink is the permanent link to a post within your blog.

Every blog has an index page where all of the most recent posts are posted in chronological order.  On this blog, you’ll find that page at https://ideborah.com/blog/

Right now, if you were to look at the page, you would find this post displayed at the top.  When the next blog post is written, it will be posted at the top and this post will fall into the second position.  As additional posts are added to the blog, the position of this post moves down the page until it is no longer visible on the first page of the blog.

The permalink is the permanent link to this post allowing me to navigate directly to the page rather than linking to it from the blog home page or one of the blog categories or tags.

The permalink is automatically generated for you once you create the post title but the permalink can be edited.

The default permalink for this post was ideborah.com/blog/anatomy-of-a-good-seo-optimized-blog-post.  I changed it to https://ideborah.com/blog/seo-blogging-tips/ so as to include the keyword phrase seo blogging tips.

Post Categories & Post Tags

Two additional areas where you can include keywords are the post categories and post tags.

Categories are the different areas of your blog.  They are the sections that you want to break your blog into.  Think of them as different subjects that will be used to group your blog posts.

On this blog, you’ll see the categories listed at the right.  They are general topics: blogging, new media marketing, tutorials.

Tags are words or phrases that are specific to each individual post and are more specific.  For example, the tags for this post are: blogging tips, seo, permalink, tagging, categories, blog optimization.

Why Does This Matter?

You’re probably wondering why I’ve been rambling on about permalinks, categories and tags.  After all, you’re thinking, aren’t categories and tags designed to benefit my reader, giving them a way to organize the content that they’re looking at?  Yes, it’s true that blog categories and post tags help to provide the structure and framework for your blog.  But they also aid in SEO in that they become part of your blog’s URL.  And the search engines give greater weight to keywords that are part of your domain.

If you don’t have a keyword rich domain, as I do for this blog (ideborah.com), then permalinks, categories and tags give you the chance to get some of those keywords up in the URL field.  If I click on the category New Media Marketing, the address bar contains the URL https://ideborah.com/blog/category/new-media-marketing/

By incorporating the strategies above, you’ll help ensure that your blog posts gain additional exposure in the search engines as well as provide valuable information to your blog readers.

iChat: Do You Optimize Your Blog Posts

  • Do you use any of the SEO optimization techniques in your blog?
  • Is SEO important to your online business?

Let me know your thoughts by posting a comment below.